Month: June 2010

Man Of Principle

by digby

Bowl me over with a feather. It turns out that Rand Paul isn’t principled after all. Shocker.

Dave Weigel reports that Rand is no longer refusing to accept money from people who voted for the TARP:

Paul campaign manager Jesse Benton confirmed that the pledge is no longer operative, and explained that it was meant for the primary, when Paul was drawing a bright line between himself and Trey Grayson.

“That contest is won,” said Benton. “He won the primary and he didn’t take money from senators who backed the bailout. Now they’re coming to support him, and he’s not going to turn down support from Republicans. They’re not looking for a seat at his table.
They’re supporting him because of his positions, and because of his steadfast commitment to principle.“

I would guess he doesn’t have the slightest clue of how ridiculous he sounds.

Update: Oh, and I suppose you’ve heard that Paul forgot to get accredited by the normal medical boards as an ophthalmologist and instead created some home-schooled credential board. He’s perfect for the “You can believe me or you can believe your lying eyes” school of Republican politics.

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Right Angle

by digby

This may be the best thumbnail sketch on Sharon Angle I’ve yet seen:

Nevada’s GOP chicken-for-a-checkup lady lost the primary to Actual Teabagger Sharron Angle, who wants to outlaw both Social Security and Alcohol. But first, before Scientologist Sharron defeats Harry Reid and becomes Senate Majority Leader, she must be introduced to Washington’s Republican Elite, and plus she has probably never traveled beyond the Reno-Sparks area, except that one time she drove “down the hill” to a mall in Sacramento.

I honestly don’t know if her desire to outlaw alcohol and social security is as big a problem as her Scientology, which even by Nevada standards may be too far out.

I could be wrong though. Wonkette points to this from the local paper, which sort of proves that it’s fairly hard to be too far out for the Republican elite:

The Las Vegas Review-Journal reports:

Angle’s attendance at the Republican luncheon raised the question whether she would be introduced by Sen. John Ensign. The fellow Nevada Republican knows her best but his profile during the campaign has been lower than low due to the taint from his extramarital affair and his status as the target of dual ethics and criminal investigations into its aftermath.

Update: lest anyone thinks this woman is just a benign eccentric, get a load of this:

Asked by the host, Lars Larson of Portland, Oregon, where she stands on Second Amendment issues, Angle replied:

You know our Founding Fathers, they put that Second Amendment in there for a good reason and that was for the people to protect themselves against a tyrannical government. And in fact Thomas Jefferson said it’s good for a country to have a revolution every twenty years. I hope that’s not where we’re going, but you know if this Congress keeps going the way it is, people are really looking toward those Second Amendment remedies and saying my goodness what can we do to turn this country around? I’ll tell you the first thing we need to do is take Harry Reid out.

Larson says Angle was floating the possiblity of armed insurrection if Congress keeps it up under Reid et al. “If it continues to do the things it’s doing, I think she’s leaving open that possibility,” Larson said. “And I think the founders believed that the public should be able to do that when the government becomes out of control. It just matters what you define as going too far.”

I’m guessing the Republican elite had better start wearing hats or something because these teabaggers aren’t too bright and they might start shooting at them by mistake. (And saying that people should use a “second amendment remedy” to “take Harry Reid out” might just be misinterpreted by some of her lunatic followers. I would hope a member of the press — if they ever get a chance to talk to her — ask her to clarify that remark.And to think that just a few years ago the right was blathering on about the left becoming a fifth column and braying incessantly that if we didn’t blindly support the government we were with the terrorists.
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Violent Tendencies

by digby

Reading about all these death threats against Teddy Kennedy over the years I couldn’t help but be reminded once again of this flyer, which was passed out in Dallas the day before JFK was assassinated:

Every time I’ve looked at this thing over the past couple of years I’ve gotten a chill down my spine. It all sounds so familiar doesn’t it? Plus ca change …

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Basic Arithmetic

by digby

Dean Baker challenges the conventional wisdom and does some basic arithmetic on one of the most solid, unquestionable pieces of conventional wisdom in the land — the idea that there will soon not be enough workers to cover all the old people:

At a time when we have the greatest oversupply of labor since the Great Depression, we are now supposed to be terrified that in a few very short years we will not have enough labor. Is that possible?

Not if we know arithmetic. The NYT gave us a little glimpse of this horror story in its Economix blog today. It showed that the ratio of dependents (defined as people over 64 or under 20) to working age people (those between the ages of 20 and 64) is supposed to rise from 0.67 today to 0.74 in 2020, and 0.83 in 2030; pretty scary, right?

Well suppose we defined a slightly different dependency ratio. This will be the ratio of people who are not working to the people who are. The idea being that people who are working must support the people who are not, regardless of their age.

In 2010, this ratio stands at 1.22. We have 139.4 million people working and 170.1 million not working. However, if we assume that we get back to near full employment and the labor force grows as the Congressional Budget Office projects and population grows as the Census Department projects, this dependency ratio will have fallen to 1.05 in 2020 and then rise to 1.07 by 2030. So, are we scared yet?

And imagine what would happen if we counted in all the undocumented workers who would happily pay into the system if they could just do their work without being harassed for trying to make a living.

And yes, I’m still scared because it’s simply an article of faith that social security must be cut (excuse me ‘reformed”) just as I’m going to need it the most because of all sorts of reasons, none of which is born out by reality.

As Kevin Drum observed the other day, all these deficit hawks are really poseurs:

The basic problem, as about a million pundits have pointed out before, is that most of the things we talk about will have only a small long-term effect on federal spending. We could raise taxes a bit, cut a few programs here and there, resolve to fight fewer wars, and fix Social Security, and that would all be great. It would have a genuinely positive effect. But it’s a drop in the ocean compared to healthcare costs. If we don’t rein those in, they’ll swamp everything else.

But what are the odds of that? The recent healthcare reform bill made a start on holding down spending, but it was a pretty small start and generated massive opposition anyway. In the near term, then, there’s simply no chance of making a credible commitment to seriously reduce the growth rate of healthcare costs. But this is the subject that separates the posers from the real players. Forget Social Security, which is a smallish problem and an easily solved one. That’s mostly good for demagogues. Healthcare spending is the 800 pound gorilla. Solve that, and you’ve solved our long-term spending problem. Ignore it, and you don’t.

I think that’s a fairly good rule of thumb. Any deficit scold who doesn’t put reducing health care costs at the very top of the agenda is just a demagogic crank doing the dirty work for the aristocratic overlords.

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Watch What You Ask

by digby

I just read Glenn Greenwald’s piece on the Etheridge incident and unsurprisingly, I agree with him. This idea that politicians, regardless of party affiliation, are allowed to assault citizens who ask them questions is beyond the pale, no matter who the questioner is. It’s a tough gig, I know, but they chose it and they have to be answerable to the people. Even if one of them is an Andrew Breitbart stooge (which this kid probably wasn’t, btw.)

But it should be noted that this kind of thing is hardly unprecedented and it never gets prosecuted. Recall Mike Stark questioning George Allen?

And my favorite of all time is this one, which sickeningly became a national joke:

John Kerry didn’t have to do the dirty work himself. The cops just manhandled and then tasered his inconvenient questioner on the ground. And we all laughed and laughed and laughed.

This Etheridge incident is disturbing. But it’s just the latest in a long line of incidents in which people are physically assaulted for asking questions of politicians.

Wasn’t it Ari Fleischer who said “watch what you say?” These guys mean it.

Update: Mike Stark reminds me that this isn’t the only incident like this he was involved in. Click here to see Senator Cornyn try to slap Mike’s camera out of his hands and grab it from him. As Mike points out, celebrities are arrested for doing this to papparazzi who are far more aggressive and relentless than Mike is. Why the double standard?

Pat Robertson Gives Marital Advice

by digby

Ladies, just so you know, if your man is stepping out it’s because you’re a bitch and you’re just not attractive enough.

TERRY MEEUWSEN (co-host): Pat, this is from Anne who says, “My husband has always been a flirt and loves to talk with other women he finds attractive. He says he would never cheat on me but his actions are starting to get to me. What should I do? PAT ROBERTSON: Anne, first thing is you need to make yourself as attractive as possible and don’t hassle him about it. And why is he doing this? Well, he’s doing it because he wants affirmation that he is still a man, that he is attractive — and he gets an affirmation of himself. That means he’s got an inferiority complex that’s coming out. And he’s not gonna cheat on you. He’s just playing. But you need to not drive him away or start hassling and hounding on him, but make yourself as beautiful as you can, as fun as you can, and say “let’s go out here, let’s go there, let’s go to the other thing.” And be sure to give him blow jobs on command.

Ok I made up the last thing — but it’s certainly implied.

I think what shocked me most about this is that Pat Robertson is still alive.

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The Book Glenn Beck Doesn’t Want You To Read

by digby

Beck’s new epic sex thriller “The Overton Window: Inside the Teabag Revolution”, may be getting all the press, but this new book by blogger Strangeapparatus should give Beck a run for his money. And this one’s about the true sex gods of the political world, bloggers.

An excerpt from “Who Blog In Darkness”:

Raven had been with many “progressive” men since she first “went online.” They had all been sleek, hip and wicked funny – more than a few, in fact, with genius-level intellects – and her soul ached to be a dancer in their mad, noble, intoxicating dream. But, no matter how much that ache ached, and no matter how failed and dishonest her trembling weakness made her feel, she had always selfishly withheld a small, secret part of herself, even from her blog-leader, Hillaire. A part she had protected and nurtured like the pearl in an akoya ever since the day she found out Rock Hudson was gay. The part called “sex.” Hillaire, whose proud. idealistic mind was yet no stranger to empathy, detected the subtle tremor in her embrace. “Is everything all right, Raven?” “Of course,” she said, lyingly, as she brushed her flowing hippie-hair back from a face that fiercely bespoke generations of benignly-enforced social diversity. “Will I see you tonight at the blog-slam?”

Consider the panther well and truly teased.

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The Long Game

by digby

Howie has an excellent piece up this morning about the big progressive win in Arkansas last Tuesday —-Blue America endorsee for the 2nd CD, Joyce Elliot, won her race against a DLC corporate lackey. What with all the White House pettiness over Lincoln and Halter this story got lost, and it’s an important one for the the netroots to include in any postmortems on what happened in Arkansas.

Howie went over Blue America’s history in the Arkansas race, recounting how we went into Arkansas with ads a year ago in targeted Democratic strongholds to try to influence Lincoln’s vote on the public option and explains our history and thinking about the Halter race. It’s true that we were all disappointed that he didn’t win after having watched Lincoln’s performance over the past few years, but for blue America, the story actually ended very well. While we didn’t officially endorse Halter, we did officially endorse Joyce Elliott. And against all the odds that we were given from Arkansas political hands (“she can’t win the nomination because she’s black”) she won.

Here’s Howie:

[V]irtually everyone I spoke with in the state told me the most progressive voice in state government was a Little Rock senator, Joyce Elliott, but that she would be unlikely to go up against Blanche and the Democratic Machine, something that would end a promising political career.

And then moderate Democrat Vic Snyder, the congressman who represented the 2nd CD, which includes all of Joyce’s senatorial district, suddenly decided to retire. Every progressive in the state wanted to see her run, although there was almost immediately a crowded field– of conservative-leaning white men. In January Blue Arkansas really introduced Joyce to outsiders like myself, calling her the “the one candidate that really thrills me”:

Senator Elliott is an excellent representative and a great progressive, but there are reasons to question her ability to win this district, and we all know why-race and ideology. The second was President Obama’s best district in Arkansas, but he still lost it by nine points. There is of course deep seated racism and reluctance to vote for African American candidates in some segments of Arkansas, even among so called Democrats, and the Republicans have a top tier recruit in Tim Griffin. Then you have to factor in sourness towards Obama and national Democrats found heavily in Arkansas, a product of both the President’s indifference to connecting to voters here and of our Democratic establishment refusal to respect voters by talking to them like adults and their cowardly refusal to stand up to the teabaggers and the rest of the rabid right. It’s all plenty of reason to give any of us pause when considering such a promising progressive as Elliott.

In the end Blue Arkansas endorsed her and fought hard for her. She won the first round of the 5-way primary, beating her closest opponent, arch conservative House Speaker Robbie Wills 39.6- 27.9%. Blue America endorsed her immediately, started raising funds for her and had her over to Crooks & Liars for a live session. Wills’ campaign was basically to have his surrogates repeat over and over that an African-American could not win in November and that if she were nominated she would be beaten by the execrable Tim Griffin. The scare tactic didn’t work and last Tuesday Joyce triumphed decisively, 53.8- 46.2%, over Wills.

If Joyce wins in November she’ll be the first Africa American to win a federal election in Arkansas since the Union troops were withdrawn from the state after the Reconstruction period that followed the Civil War. She’ll be facing Karl Rove protégé Tim Griffin, the disgraced ex-U.S. Attorney.

Elliott is a super impressive candidate. She has a great personal story, is a highly accomplished, effective politician, who rose to become the majority leader of the State Senate. In any other place she would have been elevated to national politics long before now.

But here’s the kicker. While none of the national groups were paying attention to this race because they were concentrating on Halter, they were helping Joyce Elliott win, just by being there, ginning up enthusiasm, getting out the vote. Seems that work is worth doing, even if you lose, because there’s no end to the possible salutary effects of spreading the good word wherever you can. Joyce didn’t have a lot of dedicated union or national netroots help aside from BA, but all that help those groups gave to Halter spilled over onto her campaign and a true blue progressive was nominated over an establishment corporate hack.

Howie writes:

Right after the votes rolled in AFL-CIO activist Amy Dean posted a worthwhile piece at Daily Kos Why Taking on Blanche Lincoln Was the Right Call + Building a Real Progressive Agenda.

Challenges within the primaries allow us to define what it means to be a real Democrat–to insist that the party truly puts the interests of working people first. That’s what makes elections like Tuesday’s run-off in Arkansas between Bill Halter and incumbent Senator Blanche Lincoln, the victor, so important. Labor and progressive movements got together to target Lincoln because she had opposed the Employee Free Choice Act, helped to block a robust public option in health care reform, and refused to back one of President Obama’s key nominees to the National Labor Relations Board.

Conventional wisdom within the Democratic Party states that we need strong majorities in order to pass better public policies in Washington, DC. But the logic of “more” doesn’t add up if those people we elect do not provide us with the votes we need. As long as our political strategies ask only that candidates have a “D” behind their names, we’ll never get the type of majorities that will take hard stands to confront the power of big business and create real reform.

Going back to the Carter years in the 1970s, we had large Democratic majorities in Congress, yet we saw labor law weakened and the right to collective bargaining eroded. Under Clinton, Democratic majorities gave us NAFTA and more unfair trade. If we don’t want history to repeat itself with the current administration, we cannot get wrapped up in the temporary excitement of a given electoral campaign. We need to have the memory, foresight, and strategy to craft something different. That’s why we should hope that challenges within the primaries become more standard.

Doing politics differently means two things:

1) having a higher standard of accountability; and

2) judging our success in electoral contests based on a dual bottom line.

Accountability first means being clear about what our agenda is. Strong health care and labor law reforms are key structural changes needed in our economy if we are to rebuild the American middle class. We can’t forget these in the next Congress and simply move on to new matters. Rather than waiting for the White House to lead and hoping that candidates follow, we must lead by putting our priorities forward. We don’t need friends on issues that are foundational to working people, such as health care, living wages, and making collective bargaining the norm; we need champions.

There have been countless calls from labor and other progressive constituencies for accountability from politicians. Nobody disagrees that elected officials should be made to answer for their votes. But there is not much said about how to make this happen–about what the vehicle for ensuring accountability will be.

The answer is an organized base. None of the progressive lobbies in Washington, DC can hold any elected official accountable without strong, organized, permanent grassroots organization in the home states.

That’s what Blue America’s been about since its inception. If you don’t try, don’t support progressive candidates, challenge the establishment, work hard over a long time horizon to help build progressive infrastructure it will never happen. And like all progress it happens in fits and starts, two steps forward, one step back.

It’s easy to lose heart and figure there’s no point, especially when you try something as big as the Halter campaign, with all the money and institutional clout, and lose. But it seems clear from all historical examples that it takes a while to build a movement, especially one based upon a value system, worldview and set of principles rather than a single issue. It obviously requires long term dedication to education, rhetorical refinement, infrastructure building and patience. Solidarity — the single most important aspect of movement building, in my opinion — takes time. I don’t think there are any shortcuts. And like most things in life, I would guess that it’s important to acknowledge the smaller victories and build upon them.

Joyce Elliott is facing one of the most disreputable GOP dirty tricksters in the business, Tim Griffin a truly malevolent piece of work who made his bones manufacturing lies about Al Gore in the 2000 election and went on to be the poster boy for Karl Rove’s despoiling of the US Attorneys office during the Bush administration. There is no person more unworthy of being in the United States congress. And at least partly because of a netroots and union push in the state, we have a very accomplished progressive running against him in the most progressive district in Arkansas. And he can be beaten.

So, despite the fact that the Halter campaign didn’t go the distance, never think it wasn’t worth it. If Joyce Elliott becomes the next congressional representative from the 2nd district, every penny will have been well spent, no matter what the petulant complainers from the White House said. She could very well be the one that ends up succeeding Blanche Lincoln a few years from now. That’s what playing the long game is all about.

You can donate to Joyce’s campaign here.

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Return of The Shrill

by digby

Yesterday, I pointed out how this march toward Painful Austerity reminds me of the run up to Iraq and I realized at lest some of that feeling comes from the fact that The Shrill One is one of the only people in the mainstream media to sound the alarm. Again. This time, of course, he has the added gravitas of being a Nobel Prize winner in economics, which makes the shrillness all the more compelling.

He wrote this today:

Let me start with the budget arithmetic, borrowing an approach from Brad DeLong. Consider the long-run budget implications for the United States of spending $1 trillion on stimulus at a time when the economy is suffering from severe unemployment.

That sounds like a lot of money. But the US Treasury can currently issue long-term inflation-protected securities at an interest rate of 1.75%. So the long-term cost of servicing an extra trillion dollars of borrowing is $17.5 billion, or around 0.13 percent of GDP.

And bear in mind that additional stimulus would lead to at least a somewhat stronger economy, and hence higher revenues. Almost surely, the true budget cost of $1 trillion in stimulus would be less than one-tenth of one percent of GDP – not much cost to pay for generating jobs when they’re badly needed and avoiding disastrous cuts in government services.

But we can’t afford it, say the advocates of austerity. Why? Because we must impose pain to appease the markets.

There are three problems with this claim.

First, it assumes that markets are irrational – that they will be spooked by stimulus spending and/or encouraged by austerity even though the long-run budget implications of such spending and/or austerity are trivial.

Second, we’re talking about punishing the real economy to satisfy demands that markets are not, in fact, making. It’s truly amazing to see so many people urging immediate infliction of pain when the US government remains able to borrow at remarkably low interest rates, simply because Very Serious People believe, in their wisdom, that the markets might change their mind any day now.

Third, all this presumes that if the markets were to lose faith in the US government, they would be reassured by short-term fiscal austerity. The available facts suggest otherwise: markets continue to treat Ireland, which has accepted savage austerity with little resistance, as being somewhat riskier than Spain, which has accepted austerity slowly and reluctantly.

In short: the demand for immediate austerity is based on the assertion that markets will demand such austerity in the future, even though they shouldn’t, and show no sign of making any such demand now; and that if markets do lose faith in us, self-flagellation would restore that faith, even though that hasn’t actually worked anywhere else.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is what passes for respectable policy analysis.

Again, this is reminiscent of the kind of logical arguments that few were making in the run up to the war because the political class was steamrolling the concept for a variety of reasons and the Very Serious People all went along. This is what’s happening now. And Krugman is once again the lone voice of reason in the major papers, issuing the warning while everyone else falls into line.

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Smell Test Redux

by digby

Dave Weigel reports this entirely predictable bit of public opinion:

A new Fox News poll asks 900 registered voters about the (now cooling, it seems) saga of White House job offers to Senate candidates Andrew Romanoff of Colorado and Joe Sestak of Pennsylvania. Only 12 percent of voters think such offers are illegal, yet 54 percent — including more than a third of Democrats — want them to be investigated. Why? Because 40 percent of voters think the offers were at least “unethical” … even though 65 percent think it’s a “common practice.”

That’s all it takes.

“Luckily” for us, there’s a huge catastrophe in the Gulf that is depriving them of enough oxygen and they don’t have the subpoena power to keep it going on their own. But it was a good trial run. They’ve still got it.

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